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Via Kevin Drum, David Broder decided to sit Obama and McCain down for a stern talking to about campaign civility. McCain agreed with Broder: Obama definitely deserves a stern talking.
"I'm very sorry about it," McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. "I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings" together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.His opponent, not surprisingly, was a bit confused by this take. "I think," said Obama, "the notion that somehow as a consequence of not having joint appearances, Senator McCain felt obliged to suggest that I'd rather lose a war to win a campaign doesn't automatically follow."Broder ends up largely endorsing the idea that incivility is a product of process failures -- not enough debates -- rather than the conscious decision of certain political actors (say, Steve Schmidt) who have been promoted for their incredible facility with a shiv. It's not only a conceptually peculiar conclusions, but it sort of calls into question whether Broder watched any of the final four Democratic debates, particularly the Gibson/Stephanopoulos farce. But Broder's column does contain an interesting tidbit that I've not seen reported elsewhere: Apparently the Obama campaign asked for five debates rather than the normal three, and the McCain campaign declined. For all the professed high-mindedness, it seems the McCain campaign was interested in maximizing their candidate's political advantages through his beloved townhalls, not maximizing dialogue.
